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digestion

Many years ago, when I first proposed a class on generating imagery, everyone kept asking me, “Can you actually teach that?” I’ve taught “What to Paint: Digesting the Visual World” six or seven times now, it turned out quite popular and successful and I still don’t know the answer to that question. I’ve revamped it a bit and reconfigured it as a two-day workshop, “Imagery: Digesting the Visual World” (love that gastronomic metaphor) at the Kirkland Arts Center August 16th and 17th.

There are, for good or ill, numerous opportunities to take classes or read books on “unlocking your inner artist”, “unleashing your creative forces”, “getting in touch with your inner Van Gogh/Matisse/fingerpaint-wielding five-year old”, etc.– by now you’ve probably figured out where I stand on the good/ill thing– but I think there is a way to approach the problem intellectually, or at least like an adult. The problem, defined more or less as that of a painter who has acquired some measure of technique and not being sure what to do with it, is peculiar to our affluent urban society replete with opportunities for people to study art (which is one of the best uses of affluence I can think of). It’s further complicated by an artistic zeitgeist where the prevailing winds seem to whisper that everything’s already been said and that pesky problem of the image glut.

In spite of those potential sources of severe angst, it’s actually a lot of fun for me to meet and work with artists at that juncture in their development. Not being sure “what to paint” is not the same as not having anything to say. It’s more of a translation problem: how to take what’s already floating around in your brain and what you see around you and turn it into paintings or drawings that work on a purely visual, formal level. Easy, peasy!

Art history provides a guide, and a framing device for the class, although not necessarily chronological: Stealing from the masters is one jumping-off point, as is the Pop artists’ appropriation of mass media (which has gained an awful lot of mass since their time). There are the games the Surrealists used to tap into the collective unconsciousness and whatnot, and I also throw in some more formal problems, like composing within a given format: Rules, scorned by the woo-woo crowd, can be used to take one’s mind off the imagery itself so the good stuff can seep in around the edges. Some past student work follows.

Brad Pugh did a series that came out of old baseball cards.

Degas dancers re-composed with a new color scheme and a heavy underlying texture. (Terry Mayberg)

Pop imagery cut and pasted: in this painting, Ethne Vik used a collage as a starting-off point.

In my own development, I think I started with a strong notion of what I wanted to do and then I set about finding the technique to make it happen. (How I go about it these days is detailed on my website.) However, part of the reason I like to do quick drawings from life in addition to my “real” (studio) paintings is that it can be a more spontaneous, less fraught way of making images, and some of that spontaneity finds its way back into the studio. For instance, a photographer who moved out from a neighboring studio once left some fake grass behind. I put it on the stand in a life drawing session, the model picked up an old phone as a prop, and then I before I knew it I had a story of sorts: